We’ve often talked about how to use SEO (search engine optimization) to be more visible in search engines. Yet many business owners have no idea where to start. What commonly happens is that a business owner becomes overwhelmed, and as a result, mistakes happen. SEO can be a confusing topic, so it’s not hard to fall into the common pitfalls that mean best practices get overlooked.
Here are the top 5 common SEO mistakes to avoid.
- Slow website – A slow website can hurt your search engine rankings. Google, in particular, uses page speed as a ranking factor. In addition, they also place a lot of prominence on Core Web Vitals. These are metrics that measure user experience. Therefore, it’s imperative that your website loads quickly. If it currently takes longer than 2 seconds to load your website, you should begin to improve this. See our past blog on optimizing your website.
- No metadata – If you don’t use appropriate metadata on your pages, you leave it up to the search engines to display whatever it feels is most relevant. The ‘title’ and ‘meta description’ attributes show information from your pages in the search engine results. You should include unique titles and meta descriptions on every website page. Check out how our website appears in search results.
- Blocking search engines – It’s easy to block search engines from a website accidentally. This could be a mistake in the robots.txt field, where the Googlebot is accidentally blocked from being able to crawl your website. It’s also possible to accidentally set a single page (or your whole website) to ‘noindex’ in your SEO settings. Either of these options will stop your website from indexing properly, making it difficult for potential customers to find you.
- Ignoring internal links – Internal links are an important part of any SEO work for your website. An internal link is a link on your website that, when clicked on, will take a visitor to another page on your site. Internal links help both search engines and website visitors find new content on your site. You should check through your website and look for key areas where you can include internal links. Good examples for this would be to link to product or service pages or to relevant blog articles.
- Thinking SEO is a one-time process – Let’s imagine for a moment that you’ve reached the top of the search engines. You’re #1 and visible to potential customers who are looking for you. Should you stop worrying about SEO now? Absolutely not. SEO is a long-term strategy, and additional work is always required to maintain rankings and to look for new opportunities that can benefit your business. Think of SEO as a competition. There’s always going to be a competitor looking to take the top spot.
If you are not sure how your business ranks in search results or want an audit of how your website should improve to rank better, schedule a meeting with us today. We’ll talk about how we can improve your rankings and your digital footprint.